Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Towards both Poppet and Vivien he was jealously possessive. No boyfriend was good enough. ‘Why should you bother with boy-friends when you have such a magnificent father?’ he once asked Mollie O’Rourke, and this appeared to be his general attitude. After Poppet’s wedding to Derek Jackson, he hopped into the car at Fordingbridge beside his daughter and, happily acknowledging the cheers, was driven off with her while Jackson took his place disconsolately next to the chauffeur.118 ‘He was like an old stag,’ Poppet’s second husband Villiers Bergne observed, ‘with his herd of women and children round him. Interlopers were beaten off.’119

  It had been hard for boyfriends, and it was harder still for husbands. Vivien’s husband, a distinguished haematologist, was known as her ‘medical attendant’. At least, Augustus reminded the family, he could congratulate himself on not having gone to their wedding. Why such a gorgeous girl as Vivien, or an enchanting creature like Poppet, who had given exquisite relief after the death of Pyramus, should want to end up as a hausfrau was inexplicable to him. At meals, he would sometimes draw caricatures of his in-laws, passing them round for comic appreciation; and his letters to all the family contain many invitations to disloyalty between his sons and daughters, their wives and husbands who, at one time or another, were ‘revolting’, ‘villainous’, or ‘repulsive little swine’ and who would generally learn this through some third party. His daughters-in-law (‘no oil-paintings’), who he affected to believe had been chosen for their plainness so that his sons ‘need fear no competition from me’, had a scarcely easier time of it. A recurring question was how to do away with all this proliferating family. He had a double-barrelled gun ready in the house, but was open to other suggestions. ‘I know little of toxicology but have heard the merits of ratsbane well recommended. The only question is: should the whelps be included in the purge? Personally I am all for it.’120

  Possessive over his daughters, he was fiercely competitive with his sons; and it was with them that the most bitter battles were fought. One developed an eczema that would visibly spread over his skin during a quarrel. ‘He is quite insupportable. I shall kill him soon,’ Augustus promised Dorelia. In certain moods this did not seem an exaggeration. He genuinely wanted all of them to succeed yet could not prevent himself putting obstacles in their path.

  Outside the family, the sons were treated like a branch of the nobility. When they were due to arrive at a party, the news was buzzed about, Augustus John’s sons are coming! They grew anxious to disguise themselves, to avoid this vicarious limelight, play down the possession of the awful name John. The eldest son David, for example, never referred to ‘my father’ but always to ‘John’ as if to underline his detachment.

  All of them were good looking and all of them had talent but, in the shadow of the Great Man, they dwindled. At Dane Court, David had been considered ‘a dreamer’. But his dreams of becoming an aviator like his brother Caspar (a ‘regular boy’) flopped. Influenced by the Nettleships, he took up music and played the oboe in several orchestras before giving it up and becoming a postman. ‘David has not been in the public eye recently,’ Augustus commented to his brother Edwin.

  Romilly, who had joined Francis Macnamara on the River Stour for philosophical explorations of Robinson Crusoe and the Book of Genesis, later became apprentice to a farmer, then a teetotal innkeeper at John Fothergill’s public house the Spread Eagle at Thame, before ‘commencing author’ with a volume of poems, some detective works and a minor masterpiece of autobiography, The Seventh Child, which Augustus advised him not to publish.121 When Romilly pressed for a reason, his father looked harassed and, after casting round for several minutes in silent agony, thundered out that Romilly had misspelt the name of a Welsh mountain. Besides, the title was of dubious accuracy. To which Romilly replied he would be ‘the last to assert that my book is perfect’.122 His book did not make much money and he sometimes felt ‘rather a lout having to be subsidised’. But he was the humorist in the family, and in the company of literary friends – Gerald Brenan, Gamel Woolsey and the Powys brothers – he began to feel better. ‘It’s a wicked world, and yet, well, is it?’ he asked Augustus. ‘Personally I’m beginning to enjoy it.’123

  ‘But for the sobering presence of Robin,’ Augustus wrote to one of his brothers, ‘we might all go, momentarily, off the rails.’124 Robin, it was held, achieved the most bizarre reaction against their father. After leaving school he became assistant to Sir Charles Mendel, Press Attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. Despite his dislike of the press, Augustus accepted this as a fairly honourable beginning. When Robin gave it up to study painting, Augustus was still obstinately delighted, believing that his son had a talent for drawing. Robin, however, concentrated on the study of colour, especially blue, ‘from the scientific or purely aesthetic angle’,125 eventually making ‘an important discovery on the mixing of blue and yellow’ about which he thought of writing a book. It was this apparent neglect of natural ability, infuriating to Augustus, that Robin appeared to perfect. He travelled widely, mastered seven languages, and was silent in all of them. Maddened by this misuse, as he saw it, of ‘linguistic genius’ Augustus struggled to find him employment – with Elizabeth Arden. Indeed he took up the matter of Robin’s future with everyone, ‘even with the Prime Minister’.126 Appropriately Robin took a job ‘in the censorship’, about which he ‘held his tongue’. He was transferred to Bermuda and Jamaica where (care of the Royal Bank of Canada) he farmed fruit and flowers in the hills, dabbling on lower levels in real estate. Over the years he wandered invisibly from place to place and job to job (architecture, publishing and, as a ‘more immediate means of earning money’, films). Back in England during the war, he spent much of his time, according to his brothers David and Edwin, ‘gazing intently at a pot of marmalade’. Then he was off again and in 1956 he married. By this time he was working as a travel agent in Spain where the papers reported him as having formerly been a matador. ‘He has kept this very dark hitherto,’ Augustus commented. ‘I’m sure he [Augustus] regretted our inability – as I did – to achieve a friendly and easy relationship,’ Robin wrote. ‘But the main obstacle was that he – fundamentally – was a rebel against established society and most conventions, while I hated Bohemianism and yearned for a normal life – which made me in my turn also a rebel – but in reverse.’127

  Then there was Edwin. His gift, in his father’s eyes, was for clowning, and the stage (which had been forbidden Vivien) was recommended. ‘I feel strongly you yourself could make a great success on the stage,’ Augustus advised. ‘You have a good voice and ear and an unusual comedic sense.’ After studying art in Paris, Edwin accidentally fell into professional boxing, winning, as ‘Teddy John of Chelsea’, seven of his first nine fights. ‘Edwin fought a black man last Monday and beat him,’ his father wrote proudly to a friend. On one occasion Augustus entered the ring himself, squared up opposite his son and had his photograph taken, bulging with satisfaction. ‘I like him [Edwin] immensely,’ he wrote to his son Henry. ‘…He has become a tall hefty fellow full of confidence, humour and character.’ His delight at Edwin’s success was redoubled by his own father’s horror. Old Edwin John, he told David, ‘is outraged in all his best feelings that Edwyn has adopted the brutal and degrading profession of prize-fighter but everybody else seems pleased except some Tenbyites who, according to Papa, have decided that my little career is at an end in consequence of Edwyn’s career in the Ring.’ But one other person disapproved: Gwen John. She told her nephew he was wasting his time boxing and should become a serious artist – and to Augustus’s dismay Edwin threw in the towel. Gwen’s influence was to fall awkwardly between father and son, multiplying their many misunderstandings.

  Caspar, the one who, from earliest days, had kept away, was the exception. By 1941 he was a naval captain; by 1951 a rear-admiral; by 1960 First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff; and by 1962 he had become Admiral of the Fleet Sir Caspar John, GCB. Of his son’s enthusiasm for aeroplanes, ships and the
sea Augustus understood nothing: but he understood success. ‘My son Caspar hasn’t done too badly,’ he remarked to Stuart Piggott. Of course he would make fun sometimes of ‘the gallant admiral… looking like a Peony in full bloom’, but such sallies had no poison in them. He often proposed painting Caspar ‘with all your buttons’, but never caught him decked in his ‘stripes and all’. Their relationship remained a staccato affair, neither giving ground, but the more senior Caspar became the more his father thawed. ‘Still in the navy?’ he would ask when Caspar returned on leave. But though he took this success lightly, seldom embarrassing Caspar with compliments, it gave him satisfaction. ‘You can’t go any further without damaging the ceiling,’ he pointed out. He even gave grudging approval when in 1944, after a larky wartime courtship on two bicycles, Caspar married Mary Vanderpump, known as ‘Pumpy’ (she was an ambulance driver and also worked on the Grand Union Canal). ‘I disliked P[umpy] less than I expected,’ he wrote to Poppet’s second husband, whom he was beginning to dislike rather more. ‘Caspar at any rate looks better on it which is something.’128

  There was another son, Ida’s fifth child, Henry: the odd one out who had become separated from the others after the chase round London Zoo in the summer of 1908. He had been brought up by a cousin, Edith Nettleship, in the village of Sheet, near Petersfield. It was an energetic upbringing: long walks in the open, long prayers indoors. (‘She prays an awful lot,’ Henry complained.) While serving as a nurse during the Great War, Edith had been converted to Catholicism, and had then sent Henry to Stonyhurst College, a superior Catholic school. Sometimes in the holidays he would climb on to the backs of lorries and be driven to Alderney and to Fryern, entering for a week or two the amazing world of his brothers and half-sisters. ‘He had an adventurous, not to say reckless, spirit just below the surface,’ observed his schoolfriend Tom Burns,129 which these visits brought forth. Vivien was ‘great’, Poppet a ‘great flirt’, and the two of them together were ‘perfect sisters’. ‘What more perfect sisters could one deserve?’ He longed to see more of them. Among his brothers he particularly envied David with his oboe and his country dancing. Henry didn’t play a musical instrument and ‘I can’t dance even the one-step yet. I always used to be occupied at Stonyhurst when they danced.’130 His holidays with the Johns were like a dream – the riding and tree-climbing; the invention with his half-brother Romilly of a machine that thought; the urgent swopping of stories, information, books; the pictures, the endless talk of love and philosophy that continued in Henry’s illustrated letters and included his poem about Eden in the style of Edward Lear and a complicated theological essay on ‘Girls’ Bottoms’, much criticized for its inaccuracy. He was a strangely attractive figure to the Johns, with striking good looks, a vehement personality, his laugh fierce, his manner harsh and precise. As William Rothenstein noticed, he was ‘startlingly like Ida’. ‘Henry is a wonderful boy,’ Augustus told Gwen.131 He was particularly pleased when Henry showed an interest in Romany matters. At Stonyhurst he had gained a reputation as a brilliant scholar, actor and orator, and at weekends would mount a platform at Marble Arch to argue dramatically on behalf of the Catholic Evidence Guild. But he was too unconventional to be a popular boy. The problem was: with all his energy and gifts, what should he do? He wanted to ‘have a shot at being a Jesuit’, he told Augustus. ‘But I would like to go to China first.’ Father Martin D’Arcy, who had been a pupil and teacher at Stonyhurst, was sent to interview him and, if he judged him sufficiently remarkable, groom him for the Jesuit priesthood. ‘I was captivated by Henry John,’ he wrote. ‘…He was an absolute genius… handsome, looking like an angel (except he was dark)… absolutely irresistible… I had very close to a father’s feeling for him, an affection such as I don’t think I’ve ever had for any other boy.’ In Father D’Arcy’s opinion and that of Father Cyril Martindale, the prominent Jesuit hagiographer, Henry was a miraculous boy ‘devastating for the enemies of the faith’.132 In 1926, Father D’Arcy carried him off to Rome, where he lodged at the Beda College and attended lectures at the Jesuit university, the Gregoriana. Henry’s letters from Rome to his father show how his Catholic training and John-like paganism were fusing into fantasy.

  ‘Another thing which is absorbing is how I am going to bring up my children and how I am going to spend my honeymoon (supposing I don’t become a p[riest]). I think the most awful thing that could happen to anybody would be to have horrible children… I should bring them up in some sunny place by the sea, pack their heads with fairy-stories and every conceivable pleasant Catholic custom, be extremely disciplinary when need arose, and make them learn Japanese wrestling, riding, prizefighting (i.e. not boxing), swimming, dancing, French, Latin, and acting from the cradle. We would have the most glorious caravan expeditions (like you used to do, didn’t you?) in Devonshire and France and Wales. The catechism lesson, once a week, given by myself, would be a fête. At Christmas – Xmas tree, stockings, crib, miracle-play, everything. I would take them somewhere where they could play with poor children… on at least one day of the week they would be allowed to run about naked and vast quantities of mud, soot and strawberries etc. would be piled up for their disposal. All the apostolic precepts would have to be encouraged… Tell me… what amendments you suggest. Quick, else I shall be having them on my hands. The first Communion of the ten small Johns will be a magnificent affair; if possible it will be on the sands in the sun, and afterwards the whole family will sit round having great bowls of bread and milk. Then we shall go out in sailing ships and have dances when we come back and a picnic with a terrific stew ending up with Benediction and bed.’133

  Henry had not liked Rome, but everywhere he went there at his side was Father D’Arcy, ‘who is the paragon,’ he told Augustus, ‘ – he sees every conceivable point of view without being the least bit vague or cocksure, and allows himself to be fought and contradicted perhaps more than is good for me.’ In an ejaculation of enthusiasm he invited Augustus swiftly to ‘come to Rome’ so that he could ‘cheer up D’Arcy and paint the Pope (green) and the town (red)’.134

  Father D’Arcy, with his ‘blue chin and fine, slippery mind’,135 was already famous for his brilliant converts, the best known of whom was to be Evelyn Waugh (who portrayed him as Father Rothschild in Vile Bodies). On his return from Rome, Henry decided to ‘do a D’Arcy’ and commit himself to the priesthood. In 1927 he entered as a novice the Jesuit House, Manresa, at Roehampton as the first stage of thirteen years’ training. He suffered and survived this noviceship, but it altered him. By the time he went up to Heythrop College he had become a passionate theologian. No longer did the worlds of the two fathers, D’Arcy and Augustus, mingle in happy fantasy; they frothed within him in a continuous chemical antipathy. ‘You are like Fryern,’ he wrote to Vivien. ‘Fryern is a sort of enchanted isle – very beautiful and nice and kind and fantastic; but nobody ever learns anything there.’ It was strict neo-Thomist learning that, like a missionary gospel, he strove to implant there. Summoning up all the resources of Farm Street, the English Jesuit headquarters in Mayfair, he rained on them books, pamphlets, words. With time these proselytizing exercises grew more frantic. ‘Acquaint yourself with Romilly,’ he ordered Father D’Arcy. ‘Write to him. Save him from Behaviourism… send him something on psycho-analysis… Start on immortality.’ And then: ‘There is no reason why David should travel separately. Therefore get hold of him on the platform and talk to him all the way. [Christopher] Devlin can go to the W.C. Hint forcibly to him that he should seek companions among the other youths...’ But for conversion, the Johns seemed very unripe fruit, and the only result of his efforts was that ‘our vocabularies have increased’.

  Top of this Tree of Ignorance was Augustus himself, a mighty plum. This ‘great character’ with his ‘thunderous voice’ appeared to Father D’Arcy ‘a wholly fantastic figure’. He was ‘never a Catholic’, Father D’Arcy admitted, ‘though I always felt there was a chance he might become one’. If anyone could perform thi
s miracle it was Henry. He did not hesitate.136 At times, it even seemed to him he was gaining. ‘Daddie says there might be “some small corner” for him in the Church,’ he hopefully advised Father D’Arcy. But hope sank eternal. ‘I’m afraid though we’re at a deadlock. He spurns revelation entirely – says he’s just as religious as we are.’

  Nevertheless, Henry wanted to provoke a continual discussion with Augustus over what he believed or condemned. ‘You seem so aimlessly erudite, so irresponsibly appreciative,’ he challenged him, ‘…you never think – you just observe things aesthetically – you like the sound and colour of theories. In you Beauty has not travailed into truth, nor diversity into unity.’137

  These philosophical speculations jostled with offers to buy his father ‘a penis-ring after the fashion of the Brazilian Tupis’, and advice to ‘tattoo your privies and migrate to the South Seas’.138

  Henry’s career bewildered the Johns. ‘They all seem to miss Henry a lot & cannot, I think, understand much of what took him to Man[resa], & what makes him happy there,’ Tom Burns wrote to Gwen John. ‘I told Augustus to write to him: because I [don’t] want him – or any of them to become all embittered by what must seem to them an inhuman thing – this isolation.’139

  But Augustus regarded the Catholic Church in history as a reactionary power. He retaliated to Henry’s sermonizing by trying to undermine his faith. ‘What do you believe in?’ he demanded.

  ‘What you’re told I suppose. It would be a grand training for you to get out of your church and take your chance with common mortals. When I’m well and sane I detest the anti-naturalism of religiosity and become a good “Pagan”. Chastity and poverty are horrible ideals – especially the first. Why wear a black uniform and take beastly vows? Why take your orders from a “provincial”, some deplorable decrepit in Poland. Why adopt this queer discredited premedical cosmogony? Why emasculate yourself – you will gradually become a nice old virgin aunt and probably suffer from fits which will doubtless be taken for divine possession. Much better fertilize a few Glasgow girls and send them back to Ireland – full of the Holy Ghost.’